How does Ruby compare to Python?? How good is DESIGN of Ruby compared to Python?

[Greg Ewing (using news.cis.dfn.de)]

Christian Seberino wrote:
> Python's design is godly.  I'm wondering if Ruby's is godly too.

Actually, Python's design is Guidoly, which seems to be
almost as good in practice.

As for Ruby -- if it is, Japanese gods seem to have somewhat
different tastes in language design.

Personally I much prefer Python. You'll probably get the same
answer from most people here, since this is a Python newsgroup...

> I've heard it has solid OOP design

It's more rigidly OO in the sense that there are no stand-alone
functions, only methods. But that's just a surface issue. As far
as I can see, Python's foundation is as solidly OO as anything
can get, no less so than Ruby's.

> but then I've also heard there are
> lots of weird ways to do some things kinda like Perl which is bad for me.

Ruby code is liberally sprinkled with @-signs, which tends to
make it look slightly Perl-ish. But again that's a surface
issue, and Ruby is really no more like Perl than Python is.

Some areas of real, important differences I can see are:

* Ruby makes heavy use of passing code blocks around as
parameters, to implement iteration constructs and so forth.
Ruby is very much like Smalltalk in this respect. Python
uses a different mechanism (the iteration protocol) to achieve
these things. Python's way is both more and less powerful
than Ruby's. Ruby makes it easy to define new control
structures which look just like the built-in ones, which
you can't do with Python. On the other hand, Python has
its amazingly powerful generators, for which there is no
direct equivalent in Ruby.

* In Python, functions are first-class, and
methods are implemented in terms of functions. In Ruby,
methods are the fundamental concept, and there are no
first-class functions. The result is that Python lets
you obtain a bound method from an object and use it like
any other function. You can't do that in Ruby. You can
get a method object in Ruby, but you can't call it using
normal calling syntax.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,	
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg